9TJ123-8-2009 LK VWD0011 Tradition Humanistic 6th Edition W:220mm x H:292mm 175L 115 Stora Enso M/A Magenta (V)Q How would you describe the function of color in
this poem?
Q What does this poem reveal about the personality
of the poet?CHAPTER 27 The Romantic View of Nature 99(Driving sweet buds like flocks to feed in air)
With living hues and odours plain and hill:
Wild Spirit, which art moving everywhere;
Destroyer and preserver; hear, oh, hear!
2
Thou on whose stream, ’mid the steep sky’s commotion, 15
Loose clouds like earth’s decaying leaves are shed,
Shook from the tangled boughs of Heaven and Ocean,
Angels of rain and lightning: there are spread
On the blue surface of thine aëry surge,
Like the bright hair uplifted from the head 20
Of some fierce Maenad,^1 even from the dim verge
Of the horizon to the zenith’s height,
The locks of the approaching storm. Thou dirge
Of the dying year, to which this closing night
Will be the dome of a vast sepulchre,^225
Vaulted with all thy congregated might
Of vapours, from whose solid atmosphere
Black rain, and fire, and hail will burst: O, hear!
3
Thou who didst waken from his summer dreams
The blue Mediterranean, where he lay, 30
Lulled by the coil of his crystalline streams,
Beside a pumice isle in Baiae’s bay,^3
And saw in sleep old palaces and towers
Quivering within the wave’s intenser day,
All overgrown with azure moss and flowers 35
So sweet, the sense faints picturing them! Thou
For whose path the Atlantic’s level powers
Cleave themselves into chasms, while far below
The sea-blooms and the oozy woods which wear
The sapless foliage of the ocean, know 40
Thy voice, and suddenly grow grey with fear,
And tremble and despoil themselves: O, hear!
4
If I were a dead leaf thou mightest bear;
If I were a swift cloud to fly with thee;
A wave to pant beneath thy power, and share 45
The impulse of thy strength, only less free
Than thou, O uncontrollable! If even
I were as in my boyhood, and could be
The comrade of thy wanderings over heaven,
As then, when to outstrip thy skiey speed 50
Scarce seemed a vision; I would ne’er have striven
As thus with thee in prayer in my sore need.
Oh! lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud!
I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!
A heavy weight of hours has chained and bowed 55One too like thee: tameless, and swift, and proud.
5
Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is:
What if my leaves are falling like its own!
The tumult of thy mighty harmonies
Will take from both a deep, autumnal tone, 60
Sweet though in sadness. Be thou, spirit fierce,
My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one!
Drive my dead thoughts over the universe
Like withered leaves to quicken a new birth!
And, by the incantation of this verse, 65
Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth
Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind!
Be through my lips to unawakened earth
The trumpet of a prophecy! O, Wind,
If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind? 70The Poetry of Keats
The poetry of John Keats (1795–1821), the third of the
great English nature poets, shares Shelley’s elegiac sensibil-
ity. Keats lamented the fleeting nature of life’s pleasures,
even as he contemplated the brevity of life. He lost both
his mother and his brother to tuberculosis, and he himself
succumbed to that disease at the age of twenty-five. The
threat of imminent death seems to have produced in Keats
a heightened awareness of the virtues of beauty, human
love, and friendship. He perceived these phenomena as
fleeting forms of a higher reality made permanent only in
art. For Keats, art is the great balm of the poet. Art is more
than a response to the human experience of love and
nature; it is the transmuted product of the imagination, a
higher form of nature that triumphantly outreaches the
mortal lifespan. These ideas are central to Keats’ “Ode on
a Grecian Urn.” The poem was inspired by ancient Greek
artifacts Keats had seen among those brought to London by
Lord Elgin in 1816 and placed on display in the British
Museum (see chapter 5).
In the “Ode,” Keats contemplates a Greek vase (much
like the one pictured in Figure 27.4), whose delicately
drawn figures are shown enjoying transitory pleasures.
Frozen in time on the surface of such a vase, the fair youths
will never grow old, the music of the pipes and lyres will
never cease to sound, and the lovers will never cease to
love. The “little town by river” and the other pastoral
vignettes in the poem probably did not belong to any one
existing Greek vase; yet Keats describes the imaginary urn
(his metaphoric “Cold Pastoral”) as a symbol of all great
works of art, which, because of their unchanging beauty,
remain eternally “true.” The poem concludes with the joy-
ous pronouncement: beauty and truth are one.(^1) A female attendant of Dionysus; a bacchante (see chapter 26).
(^2) Tomb.
(^3) An ancient resort in southwest Italy.